In the face of strong national consumer spending and private sector employment gains, State Controller John Chiang released California’s December financial statement showing the General Fund is running a staggering cash deficit of $21 billion on an $88.5 billion budget. This imploding financial condition is a reflection of how California’s high businesses taxes and excessive regulations are accelerating the trend of businesses abandoning the state. According to Chiang:

“While we saw positive numbers in November, December’s totals failed to meet even the latest revenue projections. Coupled with higher spending tied to unrealized cost savings, these latest revenue figures create growing concern that legislative action may be needed in the near future to ensure that the State can meet its payment obligations.”

The above are “code words” that the state is financially dysfunctional and getting worse. The December report shows that compared to last year, California revenue, at $39.4 billion, is down by 11.2% due mostly to a 26.4% nose-dive in sales tax collection, and state spending of $52.3 billion is currently running 33% higher than the state’s revenue.

The Controller does not seem impressed that Governor Brown and the California State Legislature’s only solution to fix this budget mess is to relying on voters’ willingness to approve an initiative to raise the already hefty sales tax they pay by 13% and add another surtax on the wealthy to generate $6.9 billion in revenue. Even if the public shocks pollsters and actually passes the tax increase, the non-partisan Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO) calculated the initiative would only generate $4.8 billion per year. (more…)

As a result of years of budget deficits and wasteful spending by the state legislature, California faces difficult budget challenges for the next ten years. This bad news is courtesy of a recent analysis of the state’s long-term debt obligations by state Treasurer Bill Lockyer. The analysis adds to a growing list of bad fiscal news for California, a state already struggling under the nation’s worst credit rating and suffering the highest unemployment in the country at 12%.

Even as California deals with this financial crisis, a career politician is pushing a ballot measure that would raise taxes by nearly $1 billion — but doesn’t allocate one penny to balance the state budget, pay down its debt, or to fund existing critical programs like education and public safety. This measure, the so-called California Cancer Research Act, would mandate a new bureaucracy with six political appointees that can spend tax money on buildings, salaries and benefits. This includes $16 million spent on overhead and $117 million on new buildings and facilities. These are not one-time expenditures, as such spending will continue year after year.

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Greece is the fiscally-dysfunctional member of the European Union. On this side of the pond we have California. Illustrating just how bleak the situation is on the Left coast, it was recently reported in the London Telegraph that at JP Morgan Chase’s annual meeting, the banking behemoth’s chairman Jamie Dimon warned that investors should be more concerned about California defaulting than Greece.

In the face of such dire warnings, a $20 billion budget deficit, and the lowest credit rating among all states, one might think righting the state’s financial ship would be the primary focus of legislators in Sacramento, and one would be very wrong to think so.

For a concrete example of just how Golden State legislators are fiddling while Rome burns, take Assembly Bill 1998, now sitting in the California Assembly Committee on Appropriations and scheduled for a hearing on Wednesday. Introduced by Assemblywoman Julia Brownley of Santa Monica, AB 1998 would ban all plastic and paper bags currently provided to customers at grocery stores, pharmacies, convenience stores, and other retailers statewide.

Not only is such legislation a distraction from the real issues facing the state, all evidence indicates that a bag ban is unnecessary, would be ineffective, and may have unintended consequences that create new problems. Legislative language claims that a bag prohibition is necessary to address the environmental burdens imposed by plastic bags. If that is the case, it should be incumbent upon the committee to first prove that a bag ban will not simply reduce plastic bag usage, but will actually reduce litter and improve the environment. Proponents of the bag ban have yet to provide any such evidence. In fact, evidence that a bag ban will provide zero benefit to the environment can be found right in the district of AB 1998 co-author Senator Mark Leno (D-San Francisco).

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Last night was one of those nights when I was mad as hell at the California State government and their foolish, micro-managing, Big-Nanny ways.  (Caution, dear reader, such rage at the machine has been known to cause the temporary insanity of running for public office.)

The cause of my extended rant?  AB 1953, a law passed in 2006 that goes into effect on January 1, 2010, the purpose of which was to define lead-free plumbing from 4% in fixtures down to the European Union standard of 0.25%.  Not that the science supported this change.  Once lead was removed as a gasoline additive, taken out of paints, and removed from plumbing (the Latin word for plumbing is where we get the chemical symbol for lead: Pb), human lead exposure dropped significantly.  Having a small percentage of lead bound up in a brass alloy plumbing fixture isn’t going to add a statistically meaningful amount of lead exposure to anyone.

Today’s story began when my family bought a 4-bedroom house in Irvine in 1998.  The house, built in 1979, had the original chrome-plated sink fixtures when we moved in.  As soon as I could afford it, I installed solid brass bathroom fixtures.

Well, our master bathroom faucet sprung a very slow leak on the cold water handle a few months back.  Having a few spare hours, I found the leak on the valve, took it apart, and trekked down to Lowe’s.

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